


instruments of absolution

by taylorswift



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), F/M, I'm talking a shit ton of angst, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Slow Burn, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:21:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27752227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylorswift/pseuds/taylorswift
Summary: When the world changes, we hold the things that have stayed the same close to our chests and pray they do not fail.ORpost-snap, take two.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 12
Kudos: 22





	instruments of absolution

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've thought about it, you've thought about it: it makes no ( **no!!** ) goddamn sense for natasha and clint to have literally no contact with each other after the snap and willingly be apart for so long that natasha's idea of home decor is a bunch of bows and she's crying into peanut butter sandwiches at the drop of a hat. i just don't fucking buy that, especially when they've got no excuse to not be together. the russos and m&m have proven time and time again post-endgame they've got no idea what in the fuck they're going on about, but perhaps the one tiny iota that they did right was letting someone, somewhere, move forward with the idea of clint and natasha being together post-snap and giving us [this concept art](https://i.imgur.com/GFVqCUil.jpg). said concept art has haunted me and my twitter tl for ages now, and i finally just decided to go for it and write the post-iw fic that we clintasha fans deserve. one where they actually talk? over the course of five years? and choose each other?? because hi nice to meet you i'm clintasha trash #1??? this is a very belated birthday fic for both spooky and ashlea, who i love and adore and are such a bright part of my day that typing words into a word document is just a small way of showing my love for them. y'all are the best. also, because i suck, this also happens to be a christmas gift for anyone who happens to have clicked here. i love you dearly. thanks for spending even a fraction of your day with me. it means a lot.
> 
> if you need something to listen to while you read, the playlist for this fic is [right here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5LFpXXLH8s91FSRUWgx7ak)! as always, i'll add on as time passes because i am a heaux for a solid playlist . 
> 
> chapter title is from down by silver's 'wolves.' i'm on twitter @emswifts, where i love to scream into the void about absolutely everything and nothing all at the same time. come hang out with me if you so wish. happy reading xx

##  **THREE MINUTES**

Somewhere in the world – and in more places than one – Natasha’s footprints have been photographed by the blood saturated ground. She’s familiar with massacres, has had front row seats to them on the days when she hasn’t been playing the dutiful role of executioner. She has seen horrible things, engineered horrible things, yet has never truly felt horror smashing her bones into uneven shards that make it hard to breathe or even move.

And then Thanos steps through a hole torn between two points in the universe.

It is quiet, not even the song of adrenaline that thrums in her pulse filling her ears as she claws her way out of the ground and towards the now-gauzy sunlight. The silence unnerves her, the stillness only split with a gentle breeze that pushes them through the moment and into the next. Words form on her tongue but there are chains around her jaw for reasons she cannot explain.

Something is wrong.

Her legs are unsure underneath her, as if her center of gravity has shifted and she can no longer locate it. She walks – if she can even call it walking – through the forest with cinderblocks dragging from her ankles, disoriented and the taste of earth cloying in the back of her mouth. The taste sours with every step, and then it begins to suffocate.

In the distance, someone is screaming. She’s not sure who. It could be the recesses of her brain echoing out in the need to fill the silence, or it could just be her.

The panic crescendos in her chest as she registers the solitude surrounding her and the trees. She’s never known war to be a lonely sport. She’s never known war to be quiet, nothing more than the careful caress of the wind.

Natasha stumbles blindly, the breath turning to ice in her lungs while every function in her body transitions into pause until she knows she’s not alone. The dirt kicks up underneath her boots as she runs, like it too is losing hold of its grip onto the reality it rests upon. She runs and her brain flickers through a supercut of faces of people she can’t seem to find, assigning them a horrible hypothetical fate she hopes they haven’t actually succumbed to.

Hope is a last resort, and she knows this. The last time she had anything resembling hope, she’d watched on as the fuel tank of a Boeing blew it sky high and left a scorch mark as a reminder that hope is a gamble for fools. But here she is, playing her cards and standing back on hope’s doorstep with her fist furiously colliding against the door each time her foot hits the ground in her exigency for an answer from anyone.

_SteveSamBruceThorWandaVisionJameswhoisnowBuckyRhodeyohgodohgodplease—_

They have their backs to her, standing in a small cluster around something in an open space between the trees. Relief breaks over her head like a wave as she grinds to a halt.

And then the wave knocks her square in the chest, fills her lungs with salt water that burns like hell and drags her under into the blackness.

She doesn’t even realize Steve is kneeling and holding onto Vision until it’s all right underneath her nose and her brain immediately screams _take it back, take it back now_. Her new center of gravity tips on its axis with the promise of upending her. Vision is grey and lifeless with a gaping hole in his head where the Mind Stone used to be, leaving behind a corpse that is seemingly more macabre than if Thanos had ripped out one of their spines and draped it back on them as a necklace.

It’s downing the shot of a memory that belonged to another person in a past lifetime, letting the fragment of the past flash through her mind. He had been a machine some four odd years ago in a cradle she’d risked her life to steal away from _another_ machine with a vendetta towards Tony. But he had been someone, even if ‘someone’ had taken on an ambiguous definition – someone she’d passed on her way to the fridge to get more milk, someone she’d fought beside, someone who had a bedroom a few halls down from her own. Now, Vision is nothing more than parts and screws and synthetic fibers as Steve lets the body fall from his arms. He can barely hold his own weight upright any longer, collapsing gracelessly onto the ground next to the lifeless shell.

Dust flutters up when he drops, and Natasha’s stomach of steel does a violent overturn as she pieces it all together (even if she wishes she couldn’t).

Wanda was the last person with Vision, and Wanda wouldn’t have left him willingly. Steve is sitting in what remains of her.

Rhodey is the only person who dares to piece the suffocating quiet, even if his words are a flimsy knife made of plastic. “What is this?” The numbness in his voice is the same agent now angrily racing upwards from Natasha’s feet and swallowing her limbs whole. “What the hell is happening?”

No one responds. They’re all frozen where they stand; the world has reached a standstill and they are trapped in the web. Left to think, left to speak, but their bodies bound and helpless.

“Oh god,” Steve finally sighs.

Silence fills the space from one eternity to the next and then loops back around. Steve doesn’t have to put into words what they are all thinking, what has been gutted out of them and shoved back down their throats. They have lost.

Natasha’s not unfamiliar to loss. It’s in the pillars of her spine, was built brick by brick and saw her to every pocket of the globe she’s stepped foot in. She has learned how to deal with things like loss and disappointment over the years – some ways much healthier than others. She keeps her world on a short enough leash that she can tug it back before it topples over the edge of the cliff. It’s a web she’s learned to weave for herself, threading control into solid ground to stand on. The elements have come in and forced her to make repairs, the occasional start from scratch, but she’s done it. Her strings are like steel, holding her upright when she doesn’t have the strength to do it herself.

Thanos could have never been held by such strings.

And now, here they are with a clean, surgical cut, loose as they flutter in the wind.

Another phantom knife drives up in her stomach towards her ribs and twists until it pinches and pulls out a gasp of pain from her throat.

She pukes in the weeds growing at the base of a tree before gravity kicks her legs out from under her and refuses to let her off the ground. Everything around her plays out beyond the walls of the fishbowl, muted and distorted. Okoye is nearby muttering something over and over again, a desperate prayer as grief rattles her rock-hard foundations. Thor is lost in his mind somewhere far away from here. The whine and groan of the mechanics in Rhodey’s suit adjust with every slight move he makes, still looking over his shoulder in case someone else appears.

It seems pretty clear from her position on the jungle floor that there is no one else coming. They will only come in the dust they’ve been disintegrated into, stuck to their clothes and in their hair. Natasha’s stomach lurches again.

Time sluices by in a surreal manner; it has been halved into before and after and after is abstract, far from comprehensibility and structure and a reality that Thanos has snapped into dust. She isn’t sure how long she spends on the ground, memorizing the spongy texture of the dirt with an absently trailing finger. Thanos may have snipped the tape the world runs on, but they are still running. Still moving. Still existing despite not knowing what _next_ might hold, if _next_ is even coming at all. 

Seconds or years may have passed when she finally finds it in her to mutter brokenly to Steve, "Get up." It's a tiny pinprick of clarity that allows a single drop of light to shed, her hand tightening around his forearm the only encouragement she can offer. Her strength extends so far; she doesn't have it in her to pick him up and they both know it. She barely has enough to pull herself onto her feet. "We have to..."

"What?" His eyes find hers and the breath snags uncomfortably in her chest. She used to think about how Steve's eyes were reminiscent of the sky. They were reflective of where his mind was at in any given moment. Sometimes storms passed through, but most days saw a cloudless and clear forecast. Now someone has splintered the ceiling and let the sky fall, with an uncertainty of whether the sun will ever return.

"I don't know."

It takes longer than usual for him to find it within himself to stand, clutching to Natasha so hard his fingers will be purple and yellow reminders in her skin, but they have all the time in the world now.

Now that they have lost.

##  **FIFTY-SIX MINUTES**

Natasha sifts through broken plates of glass and other debris and dust in the Citadel’s lab until she can find something that resembles a phone.

She wipes the screen off with trembling hands, a shaky exhale of relief when she sees that Thanos hasn’t plunged them back into the Stone Age and there’s still a bar of cell service. Remarkable service, even, which shifts the balance of her world onto a fine knifepoint. It will either be a successful call or it will fail in every way she could possibly think and ways she has yet to even conjure.

The number is burned into her memory. She knows it by heart – it’s a secret she’d never give up, a lifeline she’s wanted to reach for in so many inconsequential moments. Thanos considered his snap the coup de grâce, but mercy would have rolled her up in the dust and taken her as its own to keep her from having her heart brutally torn out through her ribs if (when) this doesn’t go her way. 

_Pick up_ , she screams into the universe. Once Loki had called her a child at prayer, asking for him back, but that hadn’t reeked of desperation quite like she does now. This is her on her knees, hands clasped until her knuckles are white and begging. _Pick up. Pick up the goddamn phone._

She punches the numbers clumsily, bringing the phone up to her ear in a rush and letting her world balance on a game of chance, on the precipice of hope that each ring will be the last.

“Come on,” she finds herself whispering to him in the receiver in between rings. “Answer.”

The ringing comes to an abrupt halt, and then he says, “Hey.” His voice flooding through the phone is a lazy tendril of smoke from a bonfire, the warmth of home, and it’s embarrassing at how quickly her knees buckle beneath her in relief. 

“Clint,” she sobs, hand clutching her face within the palm. “Thank god you’re okay, I’m—”

“You’ve reached Clint Barton. You know what to do at the—” A high pitched beep cuts him off, and she feels the breath being torn out of her lungs.

She frantically ends the call, her vision blurring over and the numbers on the screen doubling as she hastily redials. The tears spill over without invitation, leaving tracks where blood and dirt and ashes have taken up a residence. “Answer, goddammit,” she pleads to no one on the other end of the line, bringing it back up to her ear and counting the rings. A sob hiccups in her throat and she has to stifle it down, biting down into her fist when his prerecorded voicemail message plays back in her ear.

Natasha calls him again, and then again, until the frustration and sorrow are too much for her to sit through yet another round of him not answering that she snaps. She breaks the phone clean in half, throwing both ends angrily across the lab. They skitter into a graceless landing, just another piece of wreckage in their lost battle.

This is the only time she’s ever been able to pity Atlas. She’s only got half the weight of the world tipped onto her shoulders and it has pinned her flat against the ground without the strength to stand. There’s nothing else to do but cry, so she does. She cries until she cannot breathe and is gasping for air, cries until she begins to lose feeling with the room around her, cries until she hears footsteps approaching and hastily tries to pull herself together and cries when she ultimately fails.

“Nat,” is Bruce’s soft voice as he bends down, his touch feather gentle when he rests a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m fine.” She doesn’t know who she’s fooling with that defaulted response; she sure as hell isn’t kidding herself, and Bruce doesn’t look to be any kind of believer.

There’s still luggage she hasn't unpacked, left by the door where she had every intention of taking it with her once Bruce came around and agreed with whatever half-baked Bonnie and Clyde delirium she’d been digging half-moon nail marks into. It’s got dust and cobwebs and there are still tiny aftershocks of humiliation whenever someone trips over it and reminds her of how she’d thrown herself at him in a Hail Mary for her loneliness.

So much has happened since her otiose search for the cure to the lack of companionship that she’s let live and let die, and it is frivolous to hold onto her shredded dignity like it’s going to service as some kind of cape. It’s not going to keep her warm, and it’s not going to help her when she flies in and saves the day. She hasn’t been a hero in a long time, and this now is the thawing. Where she feels every tiny paper cut to her skin and hopes she’ll bleed out within the next hundred years.

So Natasha doesn’t bother lacing up her defenses and running to save face. She fast-forwards through the awkward conversations and delegations of who gets what and skips to the crying that she doesn’t have it in her to conceal. Bruce seems to take the same pity that he did years previous as he carefully lowers himself next to her in the floor. He doesn’t make an attempt to comfort her. He simply provides the company she never asked for while she grieves, just on the off chance she has a need for him.

Maybe he knew more than she gave him credit for.

##  **NINE HOURS**

Of the five tribes composing Wakanda, only three have representatives. The deep warmth of the afternoon sun bleeding through the windows casts a golden halo around Okoye’s silhouette, where she stands vigilant behind an empty throne with her head bowed. The leaders of the Mining and River Tribes are glorified placeholders in seats, the aftermath of Thanos turning them to stone instead of ash.

M’Baku has opted for the glass floor, slumped over.

Natasha’s mind strays from her current train of thought down a side road, attempting to calculate the number of Wakandan traditionalists that are backflipping in their graves over M’Baku’s lack of veneration in favor of quelling his exhaustion, or at the sheer fact the doors to the throne room have been opened to them.

Rhodey’s the only one of them who doesn’t need the wall to support their weight, standing alone in front of the ring of seats. Bruce is anxiously wringing out his hands, the same way he used to whenever Tony got carried away on the manic magic carpet into an R&D fever dream and failed to see the dozens of practical errors that Bruce saw directly ahead. Natasha and Steve are two sides of the same, silent coin; he is withdrawn in his thoughts, and she is content to observe in the lack of her own.

There is no designated starting point, so they throw a dart at the map and go from there.

“What do your numbers look like?” Steve asks quietly, the timbre of his voice making an uncomfortable fragment in the otherwise smooth glass that they’re relying to stay solid beneath them.

“It will take some time to determine the final count,” the leader of the River Tribe replies. “Most of my people are accounted for.”

“Most of mine are…” The Mining Tribe leader’s voice falters.

“M’Baku?” Okoye prompts, never lifting her head.

“We are scattered, just like the others. It will take time.” 

“They’re going to come knocking down the doors of this place,” Rhodey chimes in.

Perplexity wrinkles the eyebrows of the tribe leaders. “They? They who?”

“The world,” Okoye answers concisely.

Rhodey gives a small nod of acknowledgement. “They’ll want T’Challa.”

“He’s not here to explain it,” Steve mutters.

M’Baku finally looks up from the floor. “Then you will be burdened with the task of explaining how the king and half of existence has simply ceased to be.”

Bruce is still wringing his hands, and if he’s not careful, Natasha thinks he’ll dislocate one of his own fingers. “Do we even know how to explain this?”

The envelope of the world has been consistently pushed for years now, from the moment Tony told an entire press room of reporters that he was Iron Man. They’ve come close to breaking it before, especially after the veil was obliterated post-New York; alien invasions and other realms and the very-near takeover of one of Tony’s more homicidal inventions gone astray have all lost their shock factor the more frequent they are in occurrence. The Battle of New York was unprecedented until it just wasn’t. Superheroes were myth until they published a book of names and gave copies to most of the world’s governments.

What has happened isn’t too far out of the realm of plausibility, but there is something slippery in its nature. Each time they try to tie a definitive label to this, it manages to dart out of reach. Thanos has eradicated half of the universe, but the science, the logic, all the things they’ll want to give the public and let news reporters repeat verbatim, they don’t exist.

It’s a nightmare that makes Natasha’s night terrors look like some of the sweetest things to see behind the eyelids. 

“It’s what happened when we let those goddamn Accords control when we suit up and when we sit out.”

Rhodey takes a half-step to turn in their direction, aghast to discover they’re still somehow on the same fucking hamster wheel from two years ago. Clearly he’s never met Steve Rogers, the kind of dog who wouldn’t drop a grudge from his mouth to make room for a steak. “Steve—"

“I’m not blaming you or anyone who signed the Accords,” Steve snaps, even though it sure sounds that way from where she’s standing. She’s spent enough – some might call it too much – time with him over the years to know it isn’t out of anger, but rather the hurt. He is a wounded animal, lashing out to keep anyone from getting close enough to make the kill. “You did what you had to do. I’m blaming the people who thought that somehow, having the Avengers and any other powered person in their back pocket meant they had the control. They didn’t even see Thanos coming. But we did.” He pauses, finally lifting his head and meeting Rhodey’s eyes. “Tony did.”

“We couldn’t have known—”

“Tony knew,” Bruce interjects. “Ultron was supposed to be the first line of defense against him. That’s the reason we got ourselves into that mess.”

“And we see how that turned out.”

“Yet here we are.”

“Have you heard from him?” M’Baku says from his place on the ground. “This…Tony.”

Steve and Natasha both look to Bruce, who swallows uncomfortably. “Nothing.”

Nothing is now associated with a grim fate, and the lump in Natasha’s throat swells to a size she is having difficulty swallowing around. They’ve had enough stolen from right underneath them, and the thought that the loss stretches out beyond the horizon is numbing.

Steve’s chest puffs up, the same way it does when he’s about to grab the reins and start steering the situation in a direction he sees fit. “We’ll have to start answering calls. Figure out who’s survived, who didn’t, where we go from here.”

There is a derisive laugh from the floor, M’Baku’s shoulders shaking as the laugh reverberates through his body. Steve is baffled. “What? What’s so funny?”

“Where we go from here,” M’Baku clarifies in between his acerbic laughter. “In case you have not noticed, we have arrived at the end.”

“But we keep going,” Okoye hisses in dissent.

"Maybe so, General. But you cannot explain what even you don't understand to someone else, let alone the rest of the world." He lets out a sigh, interrupting the careful balance of his spear across his knees as he plants it into the ground and wraps a fist tightly around it. "The world ended today. I think it will be alright if you wait until tomorrow to start it again."

M'Baku exits the throne room and leaves the rest of them in their lost collective, too many broken parts to hope to come together and create something functional. 

##  **TWO DAYS**

Licking their wounds provides no solace, which means there is no time like the present to face the music back at home.

Dawn is just beginning to break across the mountaintops of Wakanda when they board the Quinjet, soft rays of morning sunlight silhouetting the launch pad. There is no idle conversation, no quips or comments as they load up. Everyone is quiet, accompanied by their ghosts and grief onto the plane. Okoye is the lone member of the farewell party.

“We’ll speak soon,” she promises Natasha. Under any other circumstance, the prospect would have been welcome. Instead, they are where they are, and Natasha’s lips tighten into a thin line, the only thing she has in her to offer in parting.

They’re down a pilot, so she and Steve have to dust off their skills and take the cockpit. Even if they weren’t the only two with experience flying a Quinjet – which, regrettably, they are, with Steve’s previous experiences in piloting aircraft not exactly painting the most promising of portraits and Natasha not trusting that raccoon as far as she could punt him across a football field – they’re the only two who can shove their emotions down long enough to do what has to be done.

The last time they were this haunted was when Wanda had ravaged their minds in Johannesburg. Natasha glances over her shoulder to take stock; Thor is in the floor, completely swaddled in a blanket with only his head poking out and the faraway look in his eyes giving away just how detached from reality he is. Rhodey and Bruce have a few seats sitting between them, the pair of them equally swirled up in their own retrospection. The raccoon, who is nothing more than a glorified stowaway as far as Natasha is concerned, is asleep.

Must be nice.

“What’s your plan?” she quietly asks Steve somewhere over the Atlantic, when the plane’s piloting itself and they have nothing else to do other than stare out at the never-ending expanse of water.

Steve’s leaned all the way back in his chair, one of his legs bent and eyes closed. “Haven’t really thought it through.”

“Man with a plan doesn’t have a plan,” she finds herself noting out loud. “Not sure I like this version of you.”

It’s a glimmer at who they used to be on the run, making their jokes and using them as bandages for the bleeding stitches. Straddling a line of dark humor was how they stayed sane. It’s no surprise they’re back on that fence.

Steve exhales sharply, and she sees the crack across his face as his mouth gives way into the afterimage of a smile. “There’s not much you _do_ like, Romanoff.”

“Not true.”

“No, it’s not,” he agrees quietly. There's a pause, and then he adds, “I’ve got no fuckin’ clue what we’re supposed to do. Technically speaking, our next step should be checking into the rooms they’ve had waiting for us at some supermax prison.” He shrugs, finally opening his eyes. “If you ask me, I think our punishment is going to be piecing all of this together for them.”

“Not really much of a punishment,” Natasha points out. "At least, not by their standards."

“Less work for them, though.”

“Guess we’ll be the faces of the global census that goes out.” She can picture it all too clearly, their faces shifted into a navy grayscale for a mailbox slip to remind those remaining that they are still around, and they need _their_ help figuring out who else has to bear this awful curse. It's heinous, and it is their probable reality. 

Steve drags a hand down his face, stopping over his nose and pinching the bridge. “God, Nat,” he sighs. “I just…”

He doesn’t have to finish his thought – there are too many possible ways to end it, all of which she would agree with. “Yeah,” she settles on, her half-hearted agreement.

Silence blankets them, thick and heavy. “We figure out who’s still here,” Steve says. “That’s my plan so far.”

The necessary evil. Natasha knows that they’re not going to like what they find when they start turning over rocks – it’s going to be a self-surgery, cutting themselves open without anesthesia and wrecking perfectly functional parts just to sift through the damage. There’s a tiny seed of worry that they won’t bounce back from it, either.

She’s never been an optimist; that flame’s long since snuffed out, and their newfound residence underwater all but prevents the idea of it. This loss is at such a magnitude that they wouldn’t have set themselves up for even when angled at a realistic standpoint. It’s cataclysm to an incomprehensible degree.

It’s the kind of thing they said they’d avenge, but they’ve gotten so fucking used to being the preventers they’ve forgotten who they are, who they can be, and who they don’t want to be at all. 

“Have you heard from Clint?”

Just the sound of his name is a twist of the knife in her ribs. She bites down on her lip so hard that there’s pain, blood drawing underneath the sharp calcium of her teeth. Steve’s head drops, his shoulders deflating at yet another. Natasha fixes her eyes upwards, studying the overhead controls so the tears will burn back into themselves rather than fall. “I’m sorry, Nat.”

“Me too,” she says thickly.

They don’t talk for the rest of the ride.

Upstate New York is just as quiet as it was when they left, but for different and all the wrong reasons. The mid-afternoon sun turns the sky a brilliantly cruel blue, and the air is sharp once they touch down and the cargo ramp lowers. Steve has to get on the other side of Rhodey in aiding Thor off of the floor of the Quinjet, Bruce ambles ahead of the rest of them inside the compound, and Natasha nearly trips over the goddamn space raccoon (whose existence pushes even her envelope of plausibility) on her way down the ramp.

She grinds to a stumbling halt when her eyes lift upon reaching the bottom, blonde hair ruffled gently by the wind and the moon eyes accentuating Pepper’s generally panicked face immediately capturing her attention. Neither of them know what to do in that moment aside from looking at one another, searching for answers in their expressions that the other doesn't have.

Natasha expects what she finds and keeps on walking.

Pepper falters, lower lip trembling the closer Natasha gets until she finally launches herself forward and wrestles Natasha into a hug. Natasha absorbs the blow and rocks back on her heels, carefully encompassing Pepper after a moment.

It doesn't take much to melt into her hug, considering how bone-tired she is. 

“Oh my god,” Pepper whimpers brokenly into Natasha’s shoulder. Her arms tremble in their attempt to hold the shape of their embrace around Natasha. “Wh—what the hell happened?”

“We lost,” Natasha mutters out the obvious hollowly. 

Pepper pulls back. “Tony got on that spaceship and he never came back, and then…then…”

“I know,” Natasha fills in for her. 

“Where’s Sam? Wanda? I thought...” The lump in Natasha’s throat swells, and she shakes her head, blinking back the tears. “Oh my god.”

“We lost,” is all Natasha’s able to offer by way of explanation. 

Pepper doesn't say anything else, because there isn't much else to say. She folds Natasha back into another hug, and this time, Natasha finds herself clinging onto Pepper's shoulders and digging for solace in the smell of her Marc Jacobs perfume. 

"Tony?" she finally dares to ask.

Pepper's arms tighten around her, and she feels the slight shaking motion in between her shoulder and cheek. 

Disappointment barrels into her like an angry wave, knocking her already shipwrecked self against the rocks again.

"I'm sorry," Natasha whispers.

"Me too." 

When Pepper finally peels herself out of Natasha's arms - she feels the emptiness once she's gone, an overwhelming fragility in standing alone - she forces her shoulders upwards, pushing the fallen hairs off her face. "Happy and I are making soup," she continues, draping an arm around Natasha's shoulders. "Let's go get you some."

On their way inside, Pepper adds, "Welcome home." There is nothing welcome about the dust and shadows and voices that haunt the hallways and force the guilt down her throat until she chokes.

##  **FOUR DAYS**

After a long, scalding shower that cleverly disguised the swollen angriness of her tears and almost a full day spent in bed (Steve threatened to have the raccoon bring her her next meal and that sufficed as motivation to quit the wallowing), Natasha forces herself back into the old pair of spy shoes to track down Nick.

She’s danced this dance before, back when SHIELD crumbled and Nick was busy pretending to be six feet under while she went off on what Clint affectionately called her Eat Pray Love journey. They planted secret codes in back channels, most of them meaningless nothings just to check in or to drop intel about situations in need of handling. Steve’s throttling the inventory agenda because that’s a stepping stone he can bear all his weight onto, and if anyone can track down a dead man, it’s her.

Natasha sends out a full-blown distress call on every back channel she can navigate into that Nick might be listening to and then waits to hear a reply. She waits for something for Maria, who she’s called approximately twenty-six times and texted another seventeen times across all the burner lines she knows Maria has (and the ones that she swears she doesn’t). She contemplates sending up a goddamn smoke signal if she thinks it will warrant faster results. 

There is silence. 

There’s a newfound fear blossoming and sprawling in her chest, the terror of sitting idle and waiting chaining her in ropes of ivy. She has to force herself to kick open every door, shove it down her throat no matter how chalky or bitter or outright toxic it tastes. The knowing might be decimating, but the anticipation and guessing games are sharper than a knife.

Emergency censuses across the world are siphoned straight to the mainframe and displayed in their main office; Bruce has helped Steve figure out a way to compile all the numbers and showcase them in real time while they log their own fallen. It’s the Revolving Door of Reckoning, a loop of their friend’s faces the only memory aside from their own that they were once here with them. Natasha can’t stomach being in the same room as it – she knows sooner or later she’s going to see Clint’s face and that will be it.

It will tear her apart limb by limb, the finality of his picture spinning through under the clinical typeface carving ‘KNOWN MISSING’ with dead eyes and humorless smiles that aren’t even cold.

They’re fucking dust _._

Pepper lets her borrow her laptop – Natasha’s sure hers has either been subpoenaed by the government or was dismantled and used for parts in one of Tony’s cocktail inventions – to run a fairly crude tracer on the last known burner numbers she had for Nick and Maria. It’s an old SHIELD trick, one that’s close to obsolete considering the advancements of technology, but she makes it work. It’s enough, and enough has to be the new maximum limit on her expectations. 

She sits vigil by the computer that’s running the trace, refusing to move until she gets a hit. Pepper brings her food, occasionally offering to sit with her and wait so she doesn’t have to do it alone. With Tony gone, there's a gaping void in the space of someone who needs Pepper to take care of them. Natasha's tired enough that she doesn't mind pulling in and parking in that place for a little while.

“Here,” she says quietly, sliding a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich across the table. Natasha glances up, the corners of her mouth turning upwards.

“Thanks.”

Pepper’s arms fold tightly across her chest. “Any luck yet?”

Natasha shakes her head, fingers dancing along the rim of the plate as she coaxes it closer. “Could be any minute now. Could cave in on itself and give us nothing.”

Pepper simply nods; Natasha can predict her the same way she can predict an overcast day tomorrow. If Natasha gets a hit, she’s going to request she run one on Tony’s suit in that Pepper Potts ‘I’m asking but I’m also not’ manner she couldn’t forget operating underneath the umbrella of if she tried.

Pepper runs a tight ship. There was once a time she wouldn’t have even let up for Tony himself, but now, she’s willing to sink them all the way down to the bottom of the ocean just for a point in the right direction.

There was also a time when Natasha couldn’t wrap her brain around it tight enough to make sense of it. It’s not about sense. It’s about triumph of desire over logic, need stumbling over reason until it loops around itself and makes need the reason itself. She’s lined up to step into Pepper’s shoes, taking over when the heels on her Louboutins break. 

“I—”

The computer emits a soft pinging noise, startling even Natasha. Her hand smacks the edge of the plate and sends it skittering over the edge, crashing onto the hardwoods and chipping off in a few places. The sandwich is forgotten in the floor as she zooms in on the pinpointed location.

“Where’s it at?” Pepper asks from behind her. 

“Upper Manhattan,” Natasha says, eyes skimming across the street and intersection names. 

She’s already whirling out of her seat, tugging her sweater over her shoulders. Pepper starts to stoop for the sandwich, but Natasha shakes her head. “Leave it for the raccoon.”

“I heard that,” the raccoon says lowly as she passes him, lingering in the doorway with a plate and sandwich of his own. She cannot bring herself to care.

“We got a hit,” she says as she crosses through the office. Bruce and Rhodey both peel back from the census screens, but Steve stays enamored in the numbers. It’s a never ending car crash for him, and she’s not going to be the one to reel him out of the wreckage prematurely. “Pinged Fury’s burner.”

Rhodey nods stiffly. “I’ll drive.”

They take one of Tony’s sports cars, utterly conspicuous with a cherry red coat of paint and a 414 horsepower. Rhodey drives with a lead foot through the congested streets into the city. There’s a thin stream of cars who are actively driving, weaving through the maze of abandoned vehicles with no owners left to claim them. “This is a nightmare,” Rhodey mumbles under his breath after their fifth stutter onto the brakes in the course of half a mile. “All of it.”

Traffic only gets worse when they cross over the George Washington Bridge. They take detour after detour to avoid road closures or fully blocked side-streets, Rhodey growing increasingly frustrated. New York is chaotic on a clean day but it is practically at a standstill now, the ocean of bedlam too deep to wade through. 

It vaguely reminds Natasha of Loki’s aftermath. It had taken SHIELD weeks just to sift through the Chitauri debris, and reconstruction efforts went on all the way into early 2014. The Tower had been one of the first to finish rebuilding, and it drew just as much attention as the initial opening of Stark Tower. Newspaper clippings and E! News reviews called it a beacon of hope returning to the city, rooted around the very entity that had kept their city in one piece. They thought it fitting.

Natasha had fallen off the grid per Nick’s not-so-much-of-a-request with Clint for a solid month, holing up somewhere in Washington while he cycled through the Infinity Stones’ version of a detox. They missed the parties and parades and celebrations, and they missed the clean-up efforts. They missed the cosmetic makeover that buried the horrors of aliens descending. When they made it back to New York, the city was, for the most part, glinting and glimmering and shiny brand new.

She imagines this is just a fraction of what they missed last time.

Her patience is a wick burning on both ends and it doesn’t take long to run out. “Screw this,” she mutters under her breath when they get stopped due to another road closure.

With the push of a button she sends the seatbelt skittering back into place, freeing her range of motion to open the door and nudge it wider with her foot. Rhodey does a double take, an indignant noise rising from his throat. 

“Nat—”

She slams the car door shut and begins following the intersection signs on foot, keeping her head cast towards the ground to avoid anyone with a rogue cell phone camera.

Walking trims out the fat of her travel time, putting her within a hundred foot radius of the origin location. She pauses, surveying the side street. Cars have been abandoned, giant puddles near broken fire hydrants and street lights split right at the middle. It’s skimming her sights over a ghost town.

Pocketing her phone in the back of her jeans, she begins wading through the streets looking for breadcrumbs. Glass crunches underneath her boots as she walks, wind fluttering through her hair. Dust stirs and swirls with the breeze – she’s still trying to develop an iron lining in her stomach for the sensation, the newest part of her normal. She’s developed indifference to violence and gore and returning from missions doused in gasoline and blood, and now combing the dust of half the population out of her hair is working its way onto the roster.

She comes across a black SUV, swerved up onto the sidewalk where it just barely brushes against the nose of another car. Her heart is heavy in her chest, pounding into the bone when it beats. She flings the doors open, canvasing for phones or clues or, even if it kills her, piles of dust. There’s a half-empty Core water bottle sitting in the cupholder (Maria) and a Glock 43 underneath the driver’s seat (Nick) but she can't find the phone she pinned.

She can't find any sign of them either, which only adds to the weight of the stone in the pit of her stomach.

Something catches her eye about the time the toe of her boot sends it skittering across the asphalt. She follows it, bending down to examine. It's reminiscent of a pager, with the screen blinking a small insignia. It looks like a star, squared in between a red and blue stripe. She combs through her memory for the logo, something buried deep in all of the SHIELD history that has a solid foot of dust on it by now, and she retrieves nothing.

Nick's secrets have always had their secrets, and this is where they bite everyone else in the ass. 

As she picks it up, footsteps echo off the buildings. "Nat!" Rhodey's voice ricochets through the emptiness. "Nat, what the hell?"

She steals a glance over her shoulder, slowly straightening back up with the pager pinched between her grip as her offered explanation. “What is it?” Rhodey asks as Natasha turns it over in her palm twice.

“Don’t know.” She wraps her fingers around it, clutching it tightly. "I think it's a pager.”

“A pager? For who?” 

##  **TEN DAYS**

Rainwater fills her palms, splashing off the surface as a halfway point before leaping to the ground. She’s not sure she can take this anymore.

They’re exhausting all of Tony’s lab’s energy to keep the signal the pager’s emitting continuous. The pager is becoming a point of contention the same way Tony himself is becoming a point of contention, and Natasha’s prepared to go down swinging for the former.

Steve doesn’t agree. “We can’t just sit and stare at a little beeping box all goddamn day waiting for something to happen,” his ever famous line these days, ground out through gritted teeth. “We’ve got shit to do.”

Blonde hair filled her vision, a curtain shielding the creeping red tint to her gaze. “Such as what?”

“Search and rescue,” is the second famous line, perhaps Steve’s favorite one of them all. “We need to find—”

“—Tony,” Natasha finished for him. “So you’ve said. Where? How? We don’t have the resources, Steve. We don’t have the manpower. When is the last time you crossed the final frontier of space?”

“ _He_ has.” His thumb went flying over his shoulder, gesticulation towards Rocket’s room. “He’s got a team, too. We’ve got to find them, we need all the people we can get.”

“To do what? Have backup when the world governments decide we’re no longer of any use and court-martial us into the next decade?” She shook her head. “Steve, there’s no fight coming.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you.”

“He’s still out there. Thanos has the stones somewhere, Nat, we’ve got to find Tony and whoever the hell is left and regroup.”

Natasha rises from her chair slowly. “Steve.”

“Oh, for god’s sake, Nat—”

“—we need to figure out who’s on the other end of this. Look at the facts. Fury’s gone. Half of _existence_ is gone, and Fury bypassed straight over us to distress call this person. Whether you want to swallow your pride or not and admit it is on you, but we are out of our league. What’s your plan? Waste a few months scouring space looking for Tony and then bring our ragtag team to Thanos’s front door? We don’t even know where to start on finding Tony. We’d be combing through deep space looking for a needle.”

“You’ve given up,” he accused.

“I am looking at reality,” she countered, voice verging on the snapping point of either her rage or distraught – the sensation felt alike. “You think I want them to be gone? You think I want to keep going like _this_ , that I want to live in a world without Cli—”

She caught herself before flinging over a precipice that she couldn’t see the bottom of. Steve’s expression shifted, eyebrows elevating and blue eyes widening at the near admittance of what he’s quietly known for years. “I don’t want this. I want Tony back, I want them _all_ back. But our best chance of getting to space went up there over a week ago and hasn’t returned. I’m…” She took a deep, unsteady breath. “That pager’s my step. It doesn’t have to be yours, but it’s mine.”

She can read Steve’s apprehension with her angle like it’s large print. Fury is a morally grey, ambiguous and shadowy entity encroaching on the world of black and white Steve strives to keep in balance. Steve’s never been a spy. Steve doesn’t shop in the currency of compartmentalization or secrets, and for awhile following SHIELD’s demise, she thought she could do the same. But secrets exist with good reason. Secrets are blankets of protection, secrets are doors that section off the fires, secrets are sometimes better only living in the head of one person.

Steve thinks that anything kept in the dark is better off left there. It’s also the same reason he and Tony went off like a nuclear bomb, and all his well-intended contradictions are tangling him into a knot that is suffocating even Natasha. 

He doesn’t trust Fury. She probably shouldn’t either, but she’s put her life in the cradle of his hands time and time again and there are some habits that will die when the wind takes the pieces of her.

So she sits in the rain, away from an argument or an apology or Steve’s infamous cold shoulder, and just tries to be for a minute.

Her solitude doesn’t last long; from the corner of her eye, she can see someone approaching the bench with an umbrella.

They sit down next to her – it’s Bruce, sliding closer so to cover her with the shelter of the umbrella. “You’ll get hypothermia if you’re out here much longer,” he discloses.

“I’ve gone through worse.”

He side-steps the comment, mostly because they both know it comes from a place of bullshitting. “Steve’s just not sure what the right move is. He feels like he owes Tony this much. Same way you feel like you owe Fury.”

She lifts her head, giving a short nod in response. She’s forgotten how perceptive Bruce is.

“I saw Clint’s face on the Door,” Bruce says much quieter, examining his knuckles with a great deal of focus. “I’m sorry, Nat.”

“’S okay,” is all she can bring herself to say, even though it’s the furthest thing from alright. It’s not a conversation she wants to have with Bruce – in fact, it’s _the_ conversation she wants to avoid, because she’s afraid of what he might ask or what she might respond with.

He passes her the umbrella. “Figured you might could use this.”

“Thanks.”

He leaves her alone after another dragged out moment of company, returning her to the steady way the rain falls at her feet. 

She’s soaked through to the bone by the time she decides to retreat back indoors, leaving Bruce’s umbrella right by the door. She leaves a trail of wet footprints through the halls on the way to her bedroom, discarding a pile of wet clothes in the bathroom floor when she steps into the shower.

She cries until her throat hurts and the steam filling the room is opaque.

Carefully she stitches herself back together, blow-drying her hair out – it’s the little luxuries, like hairdryers, that she’s forgotten how thoroughly she took for granted when on the run – and slipping into a fresh set of clothes before returning back down to the workshop.

She forces a deep breath into her lungs prior to stepping into the office, Steve’s back to her as he watches the never-ending motion on the monitors.

Scrolling are the rising counts of the known missing in varying countries that they’ve been on the phone with, footage of the natural disasters that the Snap engineered when Thanos threw life off balance (or as he would say, back onto its kilter), a quiet tracer for Tony’s suit that Bruce and Rhodey put together that Steve doesn’t bother to conceal from her because really, it’s no surprise – she wouldn’t ask him to take it down and he sure as hell wouldn’t ask for her permission, leaving them at their awkward stalemate.

She joins him in his watching, their quiet manifestation of a truce. As much as he’s able to drive under her skin and start yanking upwards in the name of pissing her off, he is the closest sense of comfort she has at her finger tips. Steve’s the good man in a storm she’s sought refuge in time and time again for years. She needs him far more than he will ever need her and, for now, that need surpasses her ego.

“This is a nightmare,” he finally confesses.

Tears start to burn in her eyes at his honesty – he’s not one to downplay, and his call makes it all the more bone hollowing. “I’ve had better nightmares.”

The more she watches the monitors, the more she understands Steve’s poring over it. There’s a craving in the calamity of it all that demands to be fed; the undertones of guilt for looking away feels like a privilege. At least they _can_ look away.

“Hey.” The sound of Rhodey’s voice grabs Steve’s full attention, while Natasha’s still stuck on Norway’s numbers. “So that thing just stopped doing whatever the hell it was doing.”

Her teeth lock, and when Steve glances back to seek her response, she hopes he doesn’t find himself surprised at the beeline she sets.

She leads the way into the lab, where Bruce is already running diagnostics. “What do we got?” she insists, stopping in front of the crude signal amplifier they slapped together upon her request (demand). Steve and Rhodey fall in line beside her, staring into the window where the pager has gone dark.

“Whatever signal it was sending finally crapped out,” Bruce surmises. 

“I thought we bypassed the battery,” Steve says.

Rhodey’s arms are tight across his chest. “Well, we did. It’s still plugged in, it just…just stopped.”

Steve pauses for a split second of examination. “Reboot it,” he finally concludes. “Send the signal again.”

“We bypassed the battery but who knows if it’ll survive another run. It’s old tech, it’s not…made to handle this much juice.”

“Just do it, please,” Natasha rushes out, pursing her lips against her fist. “You tell me the second you get a signal. I want to know who’s on the other end of that thing.”

She’s barely able to complete the turn on her heel, screeching to an immediate stop at the obstacle in her path that had not been there seconds ago. Like a full body apparition stands a woman, blonde hair hanging in her face and uniform boasting the same colors and symbol from the pager. Fury’s Hail Mary (or rather, Mary from Hell - if Natasha were the type to be startled by the mundane, this sudden and silent intrusion would have her soul leaping from her skin).

When the woman speaks, her solemn and gentle tone has the duality to lull one to sleep or launch a thousand ships in assault. It’s intimidating, even by Natasha’s standards. “Where’s Fury?”

Rhodey is the only one of them who isn’t so grounded in shock at the intrusion that he can’t find his voice in the back of his throat. “Who the hell are you?”

Her eyes cut over to him like a knife. “I’m Carol. Fury’s a friend.”

“Yeah, we kinda figured.”

She - Carol - continues her sweep over all of them before settling back on Natasha, framing her as either their competent leader or coordinator of the cohort of idiocy. “He’s the only person who had access to that. How’d you get it?”

“Fury’s gone,” Natasha clears her throat. “He called you right before he…”

Carol’s eyes widen, the lakes of her eyes enlarging to make room for the horror. “What happened?”

"His name's Thanos," Steve interjects. "You familiar with the Infinity Stones?"

"I've only ever come in contact with one of them. My cat swallowed it."

Natasha's plunged back into 2014, when Thor was fascinated with the functionality of a microwave and a GPS was almost as big of a culture shock to Steve as Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs; Carol's revelation has them all flummoxed, staring blankly at her as she unveils Fury's storage method for a fucking Infinity Stone like it's a breakdown of the days of the week.

"Your..."

Natasha shakes her head, invitation to deter Rhodey's comment and the subsequent spiral down the rabbit hole. "Thanos got a hold of all six stones. He snapped his fingers and wiped out half of the population."

"Here?"

"Everywhere," Steve clarifies.

Recognition dawns in Carol's eyes. "That explains all of the cosmic imbalances." Natasha glances back at Steve, whose eyebrows are knitted together as he stares on at Carol. "Whatever he did, the snap, it's thrown everything off kilter. Stars dying, new ones being born, shifts in planetary alignments. Most changes to the galaxy are slow and subtle – he forced millions of years worth of evolution on the universe in a single second. It's not that adaptable. It would be like stuffing a hot air balloon in the saddle bag of a Harley."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you're alien, right?" Rhodey looks around at the rest of them for some kind of affirmation. "That's what we're all thinking?"

"Close. Human who absorbed the energy of a light-speed engine."

"Ah, so she fits right in."

It unfurls slowly in Natasha's mind, and then it reaches its threshold and spirals open. Carol is Fury's silver bullet, the last ace up his sleeve that he's thrown their way. Someone like Carol is the shot that will stick and the shot that will do the most damage when the rest of them aren't even able to get their guns raised. Their hands might be tied but Carol is chainless, and something tells Natasha that she's able to split steel in ways they couldn't imagine. 

"You've been in space this whole time?" Natasha asks.

Carol nods concisely. "I haven't been on Earth since the nineties."

"So you've got experience in that arena."

"Plenty." Carol's hands station over her hips. "Why do you ask?"

Natasha shifts her gaze towards Steve, who is already beginning to catch on. "Could you track someone in space? If we were able to give you something to go off?"

"Sure," she says like it's nothing. 

Hers and Steve's paths converge and begin to glow.

##  **SEVENTEEN DAYS**

Natasha’s not entirely sure when she’s become the official and seemingly sole thread between the Avengers (the face of knowledge) and international governments (those lacking the first idea on anything) but the thread is fraying and unraveling at an exponential rate. She’s never liked this. Those few triumphant moments of complacency she’d gotten back when Congress needed to stick a face to the fall of SHIELD hadn’t come close to tipping the scales when stacked against their declaring her in season and picking away until all the trees were bare. She’s not a diplomat. She’s not a voice of reason or a wealth of information or someone with an inherent gift of uniting the broken and opposers and skeptics.

She’s not Steve or T’Challa or even Tony. She’s Natasha; she’s good at telling lies about the lies Nick Fury once told her to tell and hiding in plain sight.

But T’Challa is one of the billions that have been reduced to dust, and Tony is as good as dust (Carol's been off-planet for a little over a week and there's been nothing), and Steve is still clutching to this pipe dream that Tony’s somewhere in the godforsaken universe waiting for them so tightly that she doesn’t know how to pry his fingers open. 

Instead, she’s just a raw nerve that sits on call after call with country after country – many of which are countries that have glossed over the fact she’s been sitting atop their most wanted lists for nearly two years – fielding questions she’s fairly certain she’ll never have answers to. They talk at her, their words round after round of bullets that riddle her body with holes and she is so far gone she doesn’t even bother to patch them up. 

Because someone’s got to do this. No one else is stepping up, and if she’s not doing this, then she’s still wasting away by a phone waiting for a call that the pain in admitting will not come is beyond the limitations of where she can allow herself to go. She's had to get creative in what she deems unfathomable now, especially with the unprecedented taking on the mantle as the norm.

She’s somewhere between conferences with Japan and Somalia when the angry flash flood of emotions comes barreling through and decimates everything.

Natasha slams her fist down on the keyboard once the fail-safes all fail to suppress the rising wave of emotion in her throat, cutting the audio and video feed on her end. This is what panic for people who aren’t conditioned against it feels like, she thinks: the walls closing in, the pain crushing the pillars with their weight, the inability to escape or breathe or be.

She buries her face in her palms, limiting her flow of air to the tiny hole she creates between her cupped hands.

This is all _wrong._

She shouldn't give a single fuck about this, shouldn't even be here - should be off finding him, turning over every grain of sand twice until she's sure that he's gone except he is. And dwelling on the dust doesn't answer questions or paint a face for the world governments to blame. It just drives the guilt deeper into her bone marrow, because she can fall on the Clint sword a dozen times and not worry about the repercussions. She's done it before, she's just never taken it out. 

And now she's got to, so she's got a weapon to slay the dragons of political terminology.

It kills her that this is who she is going to become. 

“Nat.” The smooth, steady timbre of Okoye’s voice rings out throughout the room. It urges Natasha to find even the smallest of loose ends and tug hard, attempt to pull herself back into something resembling a whole. “Nat, can you hear me?”

She fumbles with the keys, trying to find the one that will just unmute her voice. “Yeah,” she replies, strangled. “I’m here.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m good,” Natasha deflects, swiping underneath her eyes and fingers coming away wet. “I’m…yeah. Good.”

“Nat.” Okoye implores gently, and Natasha feels the cracks in her foundation spider-web out as she sighs. "Take a break. You've been on these calls for fifteen hours."

"Feels like it's only been ten minutes," she jokes dryly, it falling flat. 

"Stop giving them a face to pin all their grievances to," she encourages. "Especially while you are still grieving yourself."

Natasha examines her cuticles with great consideration. "I'm not grieving," she mutters.

"Yes, you are. The entire world is."

"The Somalian president goes about it much different than the average person, I'm sure. He all but demanded two hours for a call."

When Natasha lifts her eyes, she sees Okoye's face floating on the holo-screen. She knows Okoye is unable to see her - probably a fortunate thing that she gets sound waves instead of her face - but Natasha needs a glimpse of someone who, despite the pain and the bleeding stitches and gaping bullet holes, can hold themselves together long enough to make it through a few calls. She needs a transfusion of strength across the continents but she fears the wires aren't strong enough. Okoye's eyes are wide, round with her concern. "Nat," she repeats. "We all lost someone."

"And if I need a distraction from that?"

"Sooner or later you will have to come face to face with it. You will either choose to look or it will grab you by the face." Okoye's shoulders bend in a small shrug. "But if you're insistent on living in denial, at least do it where it doesn't create a glutton for punishment out of you."

 _Too late,_ Natasha thinks. 

"Hop off of the calls for a little bit," Okoye suggests. "I can handle them alone for a few hours."

"You don't—"

Okoye knows what's coming before it even leaves her lips. "—I'm not asking."

Natasha exhales, feeling the weight roll off of her spine and back onto her shoulders to alleviate some of the pain. "I'll be back for the debrief with the Prime Minister."

"I expected no less."

Her lips are tight and bloodless when she smiles in farewell - until she realizes Okoye can't see her - and disconnects from the call, the holo-screen swiping down into oblivion. 

The freedom doesn't quell the despair still crashing onto the shores in her chest. She's still crying without knowing why as she goes to discard the crusts of her peanut butter sandwich (Rocket doesn't like the crusts, she's since learned) and every footsteps through the halls of the compound weighs a thousand pounds. 

Her bedroom isn't used to having someone inhabit it. Prior to the Sokovia Accords and Germany and the fallout, her room was in pristine condition, merely a room where she'd retire when she wasn't on mission to catch a few hours of sleep, or to find a reprieve from the babysitting that being an Avenger suddenly required of her. Those moments feel ripped from the pages of someone else's book, memories she's stolen and stapled into her brain as her own. She hardly remembers a time when she felt any kind of ownership over the four walls closing in around a bed and some pieces of furniture Tony picked from a catalog. 

Coming back has been jarring. Her clothes are still in the drawers where she left them, her soap untouched in the shower, her belongings exactly where she left them as if they were waiting for her return. 

She feels like she's walking through a museum each time she crosses the threshold, a shrine to what once was and what she can't get back.

A tiny jewelry box sits on her dresser, the same location she'd placed it when she'd moved in and free of two inches of dust courtesy to Tony's rigorous cleaning crews, where he too waited for a return, keeping their beds ready and rooms exactly how they left them for when the evitable became a little less so and they needed to come crawling back with their pride bobbing uncomfortably in the columns of the throat and their fingers outstretched for home. For him.

Curiosity prods her towards it, carefully opening the top. Most of her jewelry came with her on the run, considering most of it was on her person at the time of her impromptu departure from the compound. There was one thing she'd left behind, one thing she had to leave in a tombstone of the domestic life she'd found and could never hold long enough in her hands without crushing. It sits there in the black velveteen, glinting in as pristine of condition as the day she'd taken it off and tucked it away. The sight of it sours in the hollow of her stomach, a bittersweet kind of pain that nostalgia mothered and longing carried on its back.

Carefully, she threads the chain between her fingers and lifts the necklace from the jewelry box, watching as the high afternoon sunlight glints off of the delicate charm and sparkles. She's a fool to think she could ever forget, to not feel the void. 

She's got nothing left to lose so she drapes her heart back around her neck and fastens it tightly, letting the arrow rest back in the dip of her neck and reclaim its ownership over where it used to call home. 

##  **TWENTY-THREE DAYS**

Carol returns from the recesses of space with a ship on her back in the middle of the night. Tony is alive, along with one of Rocket's pseudo-teammates. Tony is in a state unlike she's ever seen him, even when his arc reactor was slowly poisoning him. There is no spark behind his eyes anymore. It's been snuffed out, leaving dead and hollow craters in his face where he watches the world. He barely makes it through a conversation with Steve before he lands himself in a hospital bed. 

They stitch together a plan based on where they think Thanos is. Natasha knows, in the pit of her chest, that this is it. It will either be a turnaround victory come twenty-three days too late, or they will be blown back to square one. 

She can't afford to think towards the latter of the two. She needs her team back. She needs the closest thing she ever had to friends and a family back. 

She needs a world with Clint in it, even if he's not speaking to her per the negotiations of his house arrest and the FBI's close watch for her and because they're still harboring bits of years-old resentment that has soured and staled from the conflict in Germany. She needs him. 

She'll trade it all to get him back. She's not the bargaining kind of woman, but Thanos has her down on her knees and prepared to beg. Prepared to sacrifice, if that's what it takes.

 _Whatever it takes_ , she tells herself. 

No matter the cost. 

##  **TWENTY-FOUR DAYS**

Thanos is dead.

The sun is setting on New York when they return, swollen low over the Hudson. They’ve only just watched the sun rise on another planet, in a garden, where life as they know it has ended and an inexplicable life they’ve been damned to has begun.

She’s lived a lifetime in a day, so it’s appropriate to return to a desolate darkness where there is no guilt for engaging the blackout features on her windows, locking the door, and pulling the covers up to her ears until one of those faintly twinkling stars overhead whispers a purpose to her. No one stands in her way, either – they are all retreating, resigning, and chances are, some of them will never cross a battle line again.

Because Thanos is dead. It’s over. The greatest evil they’ve come face to face with was left to rot in a garden, where he’ll turn into soil and breathe life into something new, and the people they lost will remain ashes and dust. 

The stones are dust, too. Everything’s dust and everything aches as it drains down a black hole with no fathoming what awaits at the bottom.

She tightly curls into herself underneath the blankets, M’Baku’s words echoing in her head. _The world ended today. I think it will be alright if you wait until tomorrow to start it again._

Exhaustion consumes her.

Some time later she’s startled awake, a nightmare without vision plummeting her back into reality. She’s not sure what time it is, if there’s daylight fighting its way to get in or if the world outside is still fast asleep. It takes a moment to register her surroundings, and then she hears it: her phone, over on the nightstand, ringing.

It makes an awful noise as it vibrates against the wood. Her head drops back against the pillow, pushing a deep sigh through her nose. She has every intention to ignore it until whoever’s calling to sell something gives it a fucking rest and leaves her a voicemail.

They don’t. As soon as there’s a splinter of peace, it begins ringing again, the noise of the vibrations whittling away at her bones. She gets through about three phone calls before she can’t take it anymore, hand violently darting out from underneath the covers to grab it and turn it off (or throw it through the window).

She opens one eye to aid in her hunt for the power button, and the name that flashes across her retinas like lightning strikes her upright.

It can’t.

Her frozenness only lasts for a beat, thawing almost instantly as she scrambles to accept the call. Her hands are shaking, unable to hit the right button before the call gives out. It’s then that she sees the notifications flashing across the screen, dozens of voicemails and panicked text messages and a waist-high stack of missed calls. 

She doesn’t have long to relish in them before another phone call takes up the screen, and this time she doesn’t waste even a second. She accepts the call and glues it to her ear, feeling the plummet of her freefall when she blurts out the moment the line connects. “Clint?”

“Natasha. _Fuck_. _”_


End file.
